Tag Archives: gov

In December Amazon released a nice guide with architecture layouts + tips across the NIST 800-53 standard. This is an important tool for ANY business looking to accelerate their operations into a distributed system model.

I took a few things away from this PDF – the two are that every company moving to the cloud should read this document. It not only provides an architecture layout that is critical in planning, but it also has numerous nuggets of awesome sprinkled throughout – an example:

Many of the SAAS service providers do not have a FedRAMP ATO, so using their services will have to be discussed with the authorizing official at the sponsoring agency. Pg 28 <– sounds simple, but very costly if done under hopeful assumptions of acceptance!

Regarding the need to harden a base system:

AWS has found that installing applications on hardened OS’s can be problematic. When the registry is locked down, it can be very difficult to install applications without a lot of errors. If this becomes an issue, our suggestion is to install applications on a clean version of windows, snapshot the OS and use GPOs (either locally or from the AD server) to lock down the OS. When applying the GPOs and backing off security settings, reboot constantly because many of the registry changes only take effect upon reboot.

A bit about the White paper as described by Amazon:

Moving from traditional data centers to the AWS cloud presents a real opportunity for workload owners to select from over 200 different security features (Figure 1 – AWS Enterprise Security Reference ) that AWS provides. “What do I need to implement in order to build a secure and compliant system that can attain an ATO from my DAA?” is a common question that government customers ask. In many cases, organizations do not possess a workforce with the necessary real-world experience required to make decision makers feel comfortable with their move to the AWS cloud. This can make it seem challenging for customers to quickly transition to the cloud and start realizing the cost benefits, increased scalability, and improved availability that the AWS cloud can provide

A helpful guide and glad to see a major Cloud provider enabling it’s clients to excel at information security operations, and in this case – FedRamp